Recession doesn't approach Great Depression in Danbury

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT), Brian Koonz STAFF WRITER

Published 1:00 am, Saturday, March 14, 2009

Even at 90 years old, Ray Peck still remembers having oatmeal as a child.

At every meal.

"It was all we had at one point during the (Great) Depression," said Peck, a Danbury man who grew up in Bethel as one of 10 children. "We would wake up and have oatmeal for breakfast and oatmeal for lunch.

"And then, we'd come home and have oatmeal for dinner," he related. "My parents did the best they could, but they weren't educated people. They worked hard, but they didn't have the education for a better job and a better life."

Peck's story -- and his family's "eat whatever you want as long as it's oatmeal" menu -- weren't unusual during the Great Depression, the 13-year financial collapse that walloped the United States from 1929 to 1942.

As hard as times are today -- and it's impossible to ignore the loss of 2.6 million jobs since November -- the folks who grew up during the Great Depression weathered an even worse storm.

Consider: Unemployment during the Great Depression hit a watermark of 24.9 percent in 1933, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The unemployment rate for February 2009 was 8.1 percent, significantly less than the 1933 numbers, but a hope-eating figure nonetheless.

"You couldn't afford to buy anything if you didn't have any money," Peck said. "My father was what you would call a day laborer. It was hard work. He did odd jobs, whatever work he could get to help the family."

At first, Danbury was pretty well insulated from the October 1929 stock market crash that spawned the Great Depression.

Danbury was mainly a blue-collar town, where shareholders were hard to come by. People didn't have cash to buy stock.

Most men worked in one of the city's many hat factories. If you weren't a hatter back then, chances were you worked in the fur trade, or another hat-related business.

In the years ahead, however, as the nation's unemployment figures climbed to 15.9 percent in 1931 and 23.6 percent in 1932, the ripples started swallowing Danbury's economy, too.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

HITS HOME

According to newspaper records at the
Danbury Museum
and
Historical Society
, "The carpenters union, at a meeting March 28, 1932, voted to accept a $1 pay decrease to $8 per day. The same union voted itself another 85-cent-a-day cut in 1933."

The same records tell of the federal government shipping 12,000 bags of flour to Danbury in 1932-33.

"As poor as we were in those days, my father and I used to go around to the houses in our neighborhood and drop vegetables on the porch," Peck said. "We didn't knock on the door or anything. That wasn't the point. We just did it.

"My father was a good man. I still remember him. I guess he remembers me, too," Peck said, squeezing out a wink. "My father taught me about the value of hard work, even when times were tough. But it's still up to the individual to make yourself the person you want to become."

As a boy, Peck wedged cardboard into his shoes to cover the holes in his soles. It was a routine practice during the Great Depression, even when the shoes were hand-me-downs a size too small.

In those days, when money was as rare as dinosaurs, nothing was wasted. And everything was saved.

Several women from
Hancock Hall
, the assisted living facility on Staples Street in Danbury, remember the Great Depression, too.

Dorothy Ahlf
, 83, was born in New London and moved to Bethel when she was 3 years old. She moved to Danbury shortly afterward.

Her father drove a bus to help support the family, while her mother worked as a maid.

Her father also played trumpet at the
Palace Theater
on Main Street to make extra money. In the summertime, Ahlf said, her father made dandelion wine in the family's bathtub.

"Our house was where the War Memorial is now. My family paid $20 a month for rent," Ahlf said. "They tore down the house to build the entrance to the War Memorial, you know.

"In those days, if you ever saw a rich person coming down the street, you thought you saw a prince or something," she added. "Money was hard to come by, but we made due."

Any way possible.

MAKING DUE IN TOUGH TIMES

"When it was cold outside, we wore two dresses instead of one," said Ahlf, one of five children. "I also remember people on the street corner on Main Street selling pencils. Fortunately, we haven't gotten to that point yet (in 2009).

"We ate very plain food -- a lot of tomato soup -- but we always had food on the table. I remember my family used to charge their groceries in those days."

Long before there were credit cards in Danbury, there were handshakes and a running tab.

"I can still remember the day my mother told me there was a big thing going on in the world," Ahlf said, shaking her head even now. "That big thing was the (Great) Depression."

Ann Evans
, 87, grew up as the oldest of three children on the lower East Side of New York. Life was simple, yet satisfying, for the only daughter of a barber.

"We were fortunate because we lived in a pretty good neighborhood," Evans said. "There were a lot of lawyers and judges and they all got haircuts from my father."

But even the families with steady work struggled as the Great Depression wore on.

"For a while, we couldn't get anything (extra) unless we had a ticket," Evans said. "I remember I had to get a pair of eyeglasses and I had to go to a clinic in school to get them. Another time, I had a coupon to get shoes from
Thom McAn
."

Unlike the people who lived among the fruit trees and farm animals in Danbury, Evans and her family bought their food from the deli down the street, or the old man pushing the produce cart, many times over cobblestones.

"My green grass was the sidewalk in front of my stoop," Evans laughed. "I might go down to the deli to get a loaf of rye bread and maybe a little sour cream. Otherwise, my mother cooked a lot of pasta in those days.

"The problem with people today is they want everything," Evans said. "We didn't live with all this fancy stuff. We lived with what we had and we were happy with that."

Mary Wayne
, 86, grew up on a 100-acre farm in Barnesville, Ga., about 60 miles south of Atlanta. She was one of 11 children who helped pick cotton, corn, potatoes and peanuts. The children also took care of a menagerie of animals.

"We never did without food though, even as big as our family was," said Wayne, whose mother died when she was 4 years old. "My daddy made sure of it."

FATHER KNOWS BEST

When he wasn't working on the farm, Wayne said, her father worked as a postal carrier, the man who stuffed letters into mailboxes from a horse and buggy. Wayne said her father lost his arm in an accident years earlier.

"My daddy also used to go turtle hunting. We had two rivers run through our property," Wayne said. "We used to have turtle soup and fried turtle. It was very tasty."

The family also owned two mules until lightning hit the barn one day and the mules died, along with a pig.

Fortunately, Daisy and Maude, the two cows Wayne milked before school, lived to see another morning.

Danbury's
Casimir Weiner
, 92, also knows a thing or two about milking cows.

Weiner's parents, who were Polish immigrants, owned a nearly 3-acre farm in Danbury during the Great Depression.

"We all worked the farm and we all lived off it. There were farms galore in Danbury in those days," Weiner explained. "We used to sell the milk for a nickel a quart. On Sundays, we had chicken dinners."

There were eight Weiner children: Cas and his brothers, Alexander, Stanley, Charlie and Eddie, and their sisters, Mary, Wanda and Helen.

"Life was tough, but we made it," Weiner said. "You didn't have any other choice."

Weiner remembers when people stood in line at the old Danbury City Hall for flour and sugar. He also remembers the bread lines at the Elm Street Bakery, the Spring Street Bakery and others.

"Bread was cheap in those days. They sold it for 5 cents a loaf," Weiner said. "But you still had to have money to buy it."

If you didn't have any money, there was usually a neighbor willing to help you out.

"Danbury more or less took care of itself in those days," Weiner said. "The only thing you can do in times like these is hang on and do the best that you can."